Renaissance Venice is generally portrayed as a city of harmony and consensus. This book offers a sharply different view by highlighting the history of religious dissent in this early modern city. Drawing on sixteenth-century records from archives of the Roman Inquisition, John Jeffries Martin reconstructs the social and cultural worlds of the Venetian heretics - those men and women who articulated their hopes for religious and political reform. Martin's analysis, which explores the interconnections of religious beliefs and social experience, offers new perspectives on the Italian Reformation and demonstrates wide-spread persistent popular support for this reform of church and society well after the establishment of the Roman Inquisition in the 1540s.